Maggie Dove

by Susan Breen

  She called Peter, who was usually happy enough to laugh with her over something, but his humor seemed to have deserted him.

  “An elevator,” he said. “What?”

  “How are you doing?”

  She could hear gunshots in the background. She pictured him lying on his couch, watching TV, chips and beer around him, though hopefully not beer, not this early in the morning. “Do you want to take a walk?” she said. “Do you want to get out?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t want to go outside right now.”

  “You should, Peter. The air will make you feel better.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “All right, well, I wanted to let you know I talked to Char Bender and I’ll be going into the city to talk to her. Maybe she’ll have some thoughts on who else might have wanted to kill Bender.”

  “Who?”

  “Bender, the man who was dead on my lawn.”

  “Char?”

  “His first wife. She lives in the city.”

  “Oh, good. Thanks.”

  “She takes Ecstasy, Peter. For Parkinson’s. I know it’s a long shot, but maybe she’s the poisoner. I’m going to check it out.”

  “Thanks, Dove.”

  He paused. She pictured that dear face and didn’t want to cause him any more anguish. She knew he’d be sitting in his apartment, scrapbooks lying around. He might well choose to sit that way for the rest of his life. Beautiful girl, she thought. Beautiful daughter to inspire such loyalty, and she felt an ache of pain run through her as sharp as a bullet. But she had to know.

  “Peter, there’s something I have to ask you about.”

  “Of course, Dove. Anything.”

  “I talked to Walter Campbell.”

  “Lucky you,” he said, his voice a haunting mixture of hope and defeat. How badly he’d wanted to be a police officer and how he’d struggled at the academy, so disappointed when he found out they didn’t hand out guns on the first day. That he would have to make it through a semester of classes before he got a gun.

  “He told me you argued with Winifred about money.”

  “No,” Peter burst out, in a tone that suggested he was telling the truth.

  “But did you argue?”

  “No,” he said. This time more softly. She’d listened to that boy lying for most of his life. She could recognize all his different tones of voice; she knew this one.

  “What did you argue about?”

  “It was nothing, Dove.”

  “It must have been something.” She remembered what Winifred had said, in her last conversation with her. You don’t see what he’s become.

  “Trust me, Dove. It was nothing. Nothing that relates to this.”

  The air was silent between them. Trust him. Have faith in him. Have faith. Her minister had once told her that a Christian was someone who lived with hope. Was that what it was? Hope? Or fear? What if she pressed him too hard and found out it was all an illusion?

  “I’m trying to help you, Peter. It would be easier if I knew all the facts.”

  Silence.

  “You know,” she said, “it would be nice if you had a little faith in me too.”

  But he clicked his phone shut, leaving her alone with her worries and her faith and her lack of it. She paced around the house for a while, but it was impossible to sit still for wondering how the meeting with Char would go and what Peter had argued with Winifred about and who could have killed Bender and Winifred and what was going to happen with Frank Bowman. When she’d paced around a sufficient number of times, she decided she had to get out of there. She’d walk up Main Street and down, which would kill some time, and maybe she’d stop in the stationery store and buy some cotton balls for a project about the parable of the lost sheep. Which she did, and then she stopped by the library and picked up her book club selection. She went to the hardware store and got picture hooks, waved at Iphigenia, waved at D’Amici, who was back at work with a large bandage over his eye.

  Then she ran into Helen Blake and Edgar. She heard them first, before she saw them. “Don’t bite that. How many times do I have to tell you? You’ll get rabies.”

  Helen had the war-torn look of a woman who’s spent the afternoon with a sociopath. Or a child. Maggie remembered how long Saturdays could seem, particularly if they started really early.

  At the sight of her, Edgar flew over to hug her, which touched her. He was looking especially angelic, with his blond hair starting to grow back. “I wanted to put my hand in the flame, but Mommy wouldn’t let me.”

  “She’s a good mother,” Maggie said.

  “You’re the only person in town he likes,” Helen said. She looked so tired. Maggie couldn’t help but think of Juliet, and what she would have been like at this age, and how she might have helped her daughter.

  “Listen,” Maggie said. “If someday you want to drop him off for a bit, I’d be happy to watch him.”

  Helen gripped her wrist. “Really?”

  “For a while,” Maggie said, stepping backward, both physically and metaphorically.

  “I should warn you that my babysitter just quit because he closed the garage door on her head.”

  “For an hour anyway,” Maggie said.

  “God bless you, Ms. Dove,” Helen said, and then flew after Edgar, who was hurling himself down the street, in pursuit of Mr. Cavanaugh’s little dog.

  After that, Maggie stopped at the bank to take out some money, and she was about to head home when she noticed a bit of a commotion on Main Street. Walking toward it, she saw it was the Arbor Day celebration, which consisted of the mayor, Walter Campbell and three women from the garden club holding shovels.

  She loved Arbor Day. It was one of her favorite holidays. She loved the whole idea of it. Planting new trees and celebrating trees and reading proclamations, which the mayor did with a nice air of gravity. When did you ever hear proclamations anymore? “Whereso the village of Darby-on-Hudson” he started, and launched into a history of Arbor Day, which made her cry, for some odd reason, thinking of a million trees planted in Nebraska, thinking of Bender, thinking of life and history, which she supposed was the purpose of a tree, insofar as a tree had a purpose, thinking…

  “I read that Lance Armstrong paid $200,000 to move a tree on his property.” It was Agnes, of course. Who else but Agnes would be thinking of uprooting trees on Arbor Day? “There’s a man with access to drugs too. Too bad he doesn’t live in this village or you’d have the perfect suspect.”

  Maggie laughed. She couldn’t help herself, though it seemed to her that strange times were coming when Agnes started to strike her funny. A Boy Scout ran up and asked if she’d like a tattoo.

  “Sure,” she said, and held out her wrist.

  “It’s temporary,” he said, as he pressed the etching of a tree onto her. When finished he looked up at Agnes, seemed about ready to ask her if she wanted a tattoo, and then ran off. Agnes watched him thoughtfully.

  “Just so you know,” Agnes said. “I don’t think Peter did it either.”

  “Really?” Maggie said.

  “He’s too much of an idiot,” Agnes said.

  Maggie figured you had to take encouragement wherever you could get it. The fact was, encouragement was in short supply lately. She looked into Agnes’ googly eyes, which stared at her, as always, so appraisingly.

  “Well, thank you, Agnes,” she said, feeling surprisingly optimistic.

  Chapter 26

  Frank Bowman sped down the West Side Highway, which was Maggie’s favorite road in the world. She loved all its twists and turns, the steel lace of the George Washington Bridge, that weird bump in the road around 96th Street that made you go flying into the air, the boat basin with its sailboats, the Trump buildings, so elegant, and then the docks where the cruise ships pulled up. Today one of the big Carnival ships had pulled in, and she gaped at the floating city so close to her, and then they kept going, down past the congestion of Midtown and then farther and farther they wen
t, until they were Downtown, in the Village, on one of those pretty cobblestone streets that the tourists never go to because they’re so preoccupied with seeing the insanity of Times Square.

  He pulled up in front of a pretty brownstone with window boxes filled with geraniums and a vivid stained-glass window on the top floor. “Somebody has money,” he said.

  “I’m surprised. I thought she was down on her luck.”

  “So,” he said, “give me my marching orders. What do I do?”

  “I don’t know,” Maggie said. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I just have to figure out if it’s true that she uses Ecstasy.”

  “And if she had a reason to kill her husband,” Frank said, eyes twinkling. He was a very enthusiastic assistant sleuth.

  Maggie smiled at him. Hard not to. He looked natty. He wore a tweed sports coat and had a scarf tied around his neck. She suspected he had ransacked his entire closet looking for an outfit appropriate for sleuthing.

  The inside of the building was less impressive than the outside. Turned out they had to walk up four flights of stairs, and she couldn’t help chuckling as she listened to Frank wheezing behind her. When they got to the landing, she saw his hair had flattened out. He peered into the metal plate on the door, fluffing up his hair, until the door creaked open and Char Bender stood before them.

  Bender’s first wife looked fragile, like a bomb had gone off alongside her and she’d been dealing with the reverberations for some time. She was thin, the knobs of her neck stuck out. She looked gray. Grieving for Bender? Maggie wondered. Hard to imagine she was mother to a 6-year-old and a 9-year-old. Not hard to see what Bender would have found appealing in Noelle’s sleek vitality.

  Both girls popped out, but Char shushed them away, back into their rooms. Maggie noticed that although the building was luxurious, the apartment itself was shabby. A cat lay on a puzzle in the middle of the kitchen table. There were unwashed dishes in the sink and a crack in the ceiling. A steam whistle started to blow and Char went to turn it off. The television was on. A cartoon was playing.

  “This is Frank Bowman,” Maggie said. “He’s helping me with my research.”

  “And what sort of research is that? I’m not sure I understand what you want to know. You said that your friend was murdered by the same person who murdered Bender.”

  “Yes. My friend Winifred Levy.” Her voice caught when she said the name. “The autopsy results showed that she was poisoned with a dose of Ecstasy from the same lot as that used to kill your husband. I thought perhaps you would know how he and my friend were connected.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Bender didn’t tell me about his life.”

  Maggie looked over at Frank, who smiled at her helpfully. She wished she could sit down, but Char clearly didn’t want her to. There was nothing to do but blurt it out.

  “I understand you sometimes use Ecstasy, and I wondered if you had any thoughts. If, maybe, you knew Winifred somehow?” She held out a picture of her friend, though Char just glanced at it. Then she seemed to realize what Maggie was asking.

  “That bitch,” Char said. “Did Noelle tell you I used Ecstasy?”

  “Honestly, I don’t care what you do,” Maggie said. “I’m just trying to figure out if someone maybe was trying to implicate you by using that drug as the murder weapon.”

  Char stared firmly into her eyes and Maggie forced herself to remember something she often thought before walking into a Sunday School classroom. Never show fear no matter what they do.

  “Parkinson’s causes a depletion in the brain’s serotonin. Ecstasy seems to modulate that change. There are people who’ve used it and found dramatic changes, even if not permanent ones. I was hoping that if I used Ecstasy before my concerts, it would help me control my tremors. But it didn’t work. All it did was cause depression and hallucinations, and so I stopped using it. So you can tell that wife of his that I am not the one who poisoned Marcus.”

  Maggie cleared her throat and looked over to Frank, not certain what to say or do next; thankfully, Frank jumped into the fray.

  “This must be your harp,” he said, pointed toward a large object in the middle of the living room, covered with a red cloth. Maggie had glanced at it briefly and thought it was a sculpture.

  “Yes,” Char said, walking over to it and pulling off the sheet. There stood before them a beautiful golden harp. Maggie had never seen one up close.

  “This is my life,” Char said, strumming her fingers across the strings, creating in that one movement a beautiful sound. “This is my joy.”

  “You’re a professional?” Frank asked. He had a way of directing his attention at a person as though every ounce of his personality was focused on them. It was fascinating to watch.

  “Yes,” Char said. “I was, anyway. When my hands worked. Now I’m nothing.”

  “You’re a mother,” Maggie felt obliged to point out.

  She shrugged. “There are a lot of mothers out there. Not many harpists.”

  “Still,” Maggie said, “it must be a comfort to have your daughters here.”

  Char began to laugh at that. The sort of laugh that sounded like a machine gun, forced and harsh. “You think?” she said, and she fell, laughing, onto a chair, which wobbled under her weight. The apartment smelled of pasta and tomato sauce, Maggie thought, and she noticed cans of Chef Boyardee in the corner.

  “A comfort? I didn’t want them here.”

  “Ssh,” Maggie said, picturing the girls in the room next door. Two little girls who she’d lived next to for two years and hardly knew, but still.

  “Believe me, they know I don’t want them here. I never said I did. I never wanted children. Told Marcus that right from the start. My career, my music, was my priority, but he wanted to be a father so badly. He told me he’d take care of them and he did. He was a great father. He loved them.”

  She paused. Maggie looked over to Frank, who shook his head slightly. She couldn’t understand this woman, she who had lost her child, who would give anything in the world to have Juliet with her. She sank down on the couch, not caring whether she was invited to or not. Frank compromised by perching toward the edge of the couch.

  “I can’t keep them. I told them that.”

  Maggie thought she could hear one of them whimpering. She felt like her heart was going to break.

  “I found a boarding school. They’ll be well taken care of. He left money for them.”

  “You didn’t want to leave them with Noelle?”

  “I would have, sure, but Marcus put a codicil in his will saying she was not to get custody of them. He was insistent about that. Had been from the moment he met her. He loved her. Well, he desired her. But he didn’t want her involved in raising the kids. That’s why he was so insistent that she not get pregnant.”

  “What do you mean?” Maggie asked, thinking of Noelle with her hand over her stomach, thinking how confident she was that Noelle was pregnant.

  “He didn’t think she would be a good mother. He was quite insistent about that. He was willing to marry her but he didn’t want her to raise his children. He had her sign a prenup. She had to agree not to become pregnant.”

  “People don’t always have control over things like that,” Maggie spit out.

  “Of course they do. Haven’t you heard of birth control?”

  “Even birth control is not always a hundred percent. Mistakes happen.”

  Char laughed. “Not with Marcus they don’t.”

  “Well,” Maggie said. “Not to be disrespectful, but he must have felt he made a mistake with your marriage. If you got divorced.”

  Char drew her eyebrows together. She looked like one of those Roman goddesses about to spew fire from her mouth. Maggie couldn’t help herself. She inched over toward Frank, hoping for protection.

  “You think he divorced me because he didn’t love me?”

  “That’s usually why it’s done.”

  “I’m the one who wanted a divorce,” C
har said. “I wanted to protect our love. We had something really special, something magical. I didn’t want him to watch it decay, to see my body disfigured. I didn’t want him remembering me this way. I wish I could have just disappeared, but I couldn’t, so I set him up with Noelle. Who do you think arranged that party when she jumped out of the cake? I knew he’d like her. She was exactly his type.”

  Maggie felt like such a prude, such a Sunday School teacher. She didn’t understand this at all. She thought marriage was about the long haul, about staying with the person for his entire life. She didn’t think love ended. Didn’t think it had an expiration mark, and as she looked at this woman she felt so sad for her, a sadness way heavier than what she felt about her illness. She also felt frightened by her ruthlessness, and by Bender’s. He had to know what Char was planning; he could have reassured her.

  “What would he do if Noelle became pregnant?”

  “She wouldn’t.”

  “Say she did,” Maggie said. “Say she was so darn fertile she managed to get pregnant. What would he do?”

  “She’d have to end the pregnancy. That’s what the contract said. She had to promise to have an abortion if she got pregnant.”

  “And if she didn’t?”

  “Then she’d lose everything,” Char said.

  “But that’s monstrous.”

  “She’s a grown woman. She knew what she was agreeing to when she married him. You make your choices, don’t you?”

  Now, that, Maggie thought, was a reason to murder. Anyone would murder to protect their child—well, anyone but Char. If Noelle found out she was pregnant and didn’t want to give up the baby, she might have felt forced to kill Marcus. Maggie didn’t know why Noelle would want to kill Winifred, but at least this was a motive that was as good as Peter’s. Better, even.

  “We found out something Walter Campbell doesn’t know,” she said to Frank, when they got back to his car. “I’d feel triumphant, if I weren’t now clinically depressed.”

  “She was tough,” Frank agreed. He roared out of the parking spot, as eager as Maggie to leave there, she imagined.